There are two ways to look at these shortcuts. Many players seem to be looking at them as a door that would otherwise be locked, guarded, non-existent, etc. if they aren’t opened. They are looking at them as if they are like the garage doors in Whittleton Creek where you need to find a key or have a lockpick or elude a guard. In this sense, I can see how the shortcuts could be seen as bad.
Other players though are looking at them as a hole in the wall or unguarded ladder that is just not available until you open it up. This is more like the vine you can climb to get into the mansion in Santa Fortuna or the roof you can drop down from in Sapienza. These shortcuts are always there, even the first time you play if you know where to find them. In this sense, the shortcuts are no worse than a hole in a wall.
I think the only one that’s really egregious that anyone has mentioned is the one in Berlin that gets you around the frisk point into the club. Even that isn’t that terrible as there’s more than one way to get into the club besides that door and it’s not as if there’s no way to get a weapon into the club even with the frisk point.
I guess it comes down to if you think the shortcuts would otherwise be a door, then they’re bad. If you think they’d otherwise just be a hole, then they’re good.
I know what you mean but that is relative to each player. The problem is as I said earlier a lot of players want to play the level in it’s default state which is now impossible without some sort of workaround. This was previously possible because you could just choose the exact same conditions as the first time you played the level i.e. same loadout, starting position, outfit etc but this new aspect gives the player no control over whether it is in the level or not which I think should be modifiable in some way via either resetting or removing the persistency.
That’s pretty much what I said so we agree. I wouldn’t mind if the developers put in an option to close those shortcuts to “reset” the level but I wonder how many would actually bother to use it.
Some of them are very good as quick exits once the mission is complete as they are only usually unlockable from one side so I think they may have put them in as convenient exits out of the level after the targets have ben killed and then expanded the idea to make them persistent so that they can also act as shortcuts on replays.
I like the idea of a default after the opening story sections, though I do think it should always be a suit opening. The radio tower instead of the club entrance for Berlin, for example.
I don’t mind the ladders, although the ladders could have been changed to be released by shooting them after first time you break them open, but the doors could be reset again, or be able to be closed/open from both sides after open them for the first time.
I’ve looked into this a bit more. If you play offline then the shortcuts are closed when you replay a level. Obviously this doesn’t reset them altogether because the next time you go online any shortcuts you’ve opened before will be open again but its just to show it is connected to being online.
A weird thing I noticed though is that, even when playing offline, when replaying Dubai all of the elevators were open like the game had remembered that I had previously opened them like it does with Shortcuts. I tried deleting my local save games and this seemed to fix this and now the elevators are closed when I replay the level. I’m pretty sure this is a bug because I don’t think the opening of the elevators in Dubai is meant to be one of these persistent shortcuts.
I also noticed that in Dubai. It could be a bug because when I loaded a Mendoza save, the ceiling windows were closed, despite having opened them prior to the save. The control panel prompts also gave me the option of closing them, rather than opening them.
Here’s a video showing what I mentioned above about the Dubai elevators. You don’t even have to finish the mission for the game to ‘remember’ that you opened the elevator doors which makes them even more persistent than the persistent shortcuts
To do this I deleted all of my saves and disabled autosave first then started the level. As you can see upon first playing the level the elevator doors are closed, I then rush through the level and open them via the terminal and then restart the level and upon checking the elevator doors again they are now open:-
